Currrent State of Play

I'm doing a distance learning MBA at Warwick Business School and right at this moment progress has slowed to a crawl.

There are a number of reasons for this.

1. I've been doing it for a while now and my initial enthusiasm has dwindled; and
2. Without day to day contact with other students it's difficult to keep motivated; and
3. Worse yet my wife, my baby, my job and all the other things in mylife put pressure on my time and always seem more important; but
4. Even worse is my desire to do an Ironman which means I get up at 0500 every morning and fall asleep at 2200 each night. I also lose every Saturday morning to my long bike; and
5. Have to find ways to give Senay and Maya the quality time tyhat we need.

It's not only these though:

1. I dislike academics and academic conventions. I don't have much time for them and I find it difficult to mask my contempt.
2. Much of the work is too easy and often I feel like a monkey jumping through hoops; but sometimes I'm too arrogant and miss many of the subtle points that I should have picked up.
3. I get impatient at spending hours on cases or on problems - and superficially absorb the knowledge - but don't internalise it; and 
4. I get frustrated because it is so difficult to apply it in the workplace - and how much use is theory when I need to get a return on my investment through application.

So I'm on my second academic year out of three and have chosen to extend my second year because of the various pressures listed above. I am doing a number of modules, each having 10 lessons and 4 Teacher Marked Assessments (TMAs).

• Entrepreneurial Finance - Finished
• Strategic Advantage - 2 TMA's complete
• Operations Strategy - 2 TMA's complete
• International Marketing - Online module in early 2008 but need to start preparing for it.
• Modelling - Nothing of significance
• Accounting - 1 TMA complete I think.

Put like that it doesn't look too bad. I want to complete Operations strategy quickly now. My target is the end of November.

December will be a difficult month and so it will be spent preparing for Marketing in January and February when I have a lot of travelling and competitions.

March should be a good opportunity to kill strategic advantage as I will be doing no training, having done my Ironman.

April and May can be the target for Modelling with June and July killing off accounting - all ready for the september seminar and then exams in December.